The Inconvenience Store

Dawn hadn’t been too long ago and the air had that pleasant bite. It was crisp, and while I was glad for my thicker flannel I knew but the sun would warm me through the clear sky. Regina was oblivious to any chill, minor or otherwise I suspected, and seemed to gracefully dance her way through the quiet street. Perhaps it was just because her hips swayed so much, and every step of hers felt light compared to my pavement slapping footwear. I was acutely aware and embarrassed that I had forgotten to offer Regina any shoes, but she seemed perfectly keen to tread barefoot from my apartment down a few blocks to the convenience store most convenient to me.

The older woman behind the counter, really only noticeably aged by virtue of the grey in her high ponytail and a few prominent laughs around her eyes, nodded as the automatic doors slid open. When she saw the angel who accompanied me there was a smile and immediate questions on Brooke the store owner’s face, but I simply kept my head down and ushered Regina deeper into the aisles for now. The Commodore Inn Convenience Store had been built on the long cooled remains of the Commodore Inn, an old tavern turned hotel turned smouldering ash heap when it burned down some twenty years ago. The shop’s original owners thought the name was clever, in it’s cheeky way, even if confused tourists sometimes wandered in looking for a place to stay then left with a few bottles of water and a stick of gum instead. “Sorry about the inconvenience!” they would say, grinningly. Brooke had kept the name too when she took over about four years ago. I half suspected that was the reason she bought the place at all.

It was well stocked for a 24-hour convenience store, with pretty much anything you could buy at a supermarket available on it’s long rows of shelves aside from fresh meat and vegetables.

I dropped some milk and bread and frozen lasagne rolls into my basket as Regina somehow followed me while being ahead of me, sashaying to and fro like an awfully distracting and sexy moth.

“Is there anything you want?” I asked, then quickly regretting it as she stopped and spun and the skirt lifted to reveal some of her favourite parts to me for a second.

“Mmm… I can think of a couple of things, Ringmaster,” she said, as if her innuendos were cunning.

“To eat I mean,” I said, realising my mistake again as she raised her lovely eyebrows and I speedily made another amendment. “Food. Any food you like?” She did her twirl again and faced the other way, the view of her so soft butt aggravatingly alluring and I gripped the handles of my shopping basket tighter.

“Food is just food, Ringmaster,” she sighed. “I’ll eat whatever. It’s not like I even-” Then she stopped, and I looked up from her covered butt (that I was still observing just in case a breeze rushed into the air conditioned store) to see her staring into a tall freezer. “Ice cream,” she said, suddenly mesmerised. I possibly fell in love even more, watching the expression of wonder sparkling on her face.

“So you like ice cream then,” I guessed, rather amazed myself that something so simple seemed to strike the Goddess into such stillness.

“Are all of these … different flavours of ice cream?” she asked me, still staring into the frost fogged glass. I nodded.

“Yeah. For that brand anyway.” When I pointed to the freezer next to it, lined from top to bottom with another set of tubs of varying chips and chunks and hunks and fudges, Regina gasped.

“When did they make so many?” she cried, drawn in closer then pressing her hands against the doors.

“They’re always inventing new ones,” I said with a shrug, trying to sound nonchalant, as if I had anything to do with the magic of food flavour technology. This was an eye opening moment though. Perhaps Regina had more vices than just her obvious one. “Pick something you want to try and bring it to the counter,” I told her, unaware of the difficult scope of my command as I left her to marvel at 21st century flavours and went to finish the rest of my shopping.

When I placed my basket onto Brooke’s counter she tried not to seem like her nosy self. For a grand total of six seconds.

“So,” she began, pausing her sentence there as she scanned a few items and dropped them into a bag as if she was loading up her question gun. “Who’s that then?” She nodded towards Regina at the other end of the store. “A customer?” Brooke’s eyebrows didn’t wiggle, but her voice certainly suggested they should have.

“No,” I said, almost snorting. “You know I don’t do that sort of thing.” That was a pretty automatic response I had to people, whether they knew about my past relationship habits or not, but only I knew this situation was a little different. “She’s just a friend,” I added, managing not to smirk. Brooke really didn’t know much about me other than what I did for a living.

“Oh.” Her shoulders sagged and that even made me a little sad, but I smiled internally and watched her continue bagging my groceries. Even though our interactions were always brief, and I would hesitate to even call her a friend with how separate our lives were, Brooke reminded me a bit of my mom. She was younger than my mother of course, but she looked tired a lot of the time with the shallow bags under her grey eyes. She only looked tired though, perhaps the side effect of seemingly operating the store by herself all the time. The woman was in fact rather energetic whenever I saw her, which would be at any hour of the day or night in the shop. I couldn’t tell if she slept there, or never slept at all. “No work today then?” she asked, since I usually only came in for a shop this bountiful on my days off. I just gave her a polite nod, which seemed good enough for her, and she kept putting my things away.

Despite the weariness of her features I noticed she was very pretty… Perhaps because of that ever present, thin lipped smile. She wore dark eyeliner which made her gaze seem brighter, and had such long lashes I was a little jealous. Her neck was also smooth, bared as it was now with her loose dark tank top under that green plaid jacket on her shoulders. I could see her freckled, pale skin at the top of her tits thanks to the afforded cleavage and suddenly realised I was ogling her and snapped to avert my eyes, back up to her handsome face. She didn’t seem to notice but I blushed anyway, realising now that she was more than just ‘pretty’ in my eyes. She was sexy… in a different way to Regina, and I for the first time found her loneliness making me fidget. Maybe she needed someone to hold her… maybe…“Whoa there!” Brooke had gotten off her little stool behind the counter. At first I thought she had peeked at my intrusive thoughts or maybe I had grabbed at her without knowing, but I realised she was now looking at Regina who had come up to the counter. With what looked like a tub of every single flavour of ice cream in her arms, stacked in surprisingly neat towers she balanced against her chest.

The Goddess regarded me with a deeply worried expression, brow knit sternly.

“I could not decide on which to try,” she confessed, a hint of confusion and betrayal in her voice, like I had been unfair to her to make her face such a gamut of choice in the first place. She almost wouldn’t let me help her with the precarious load but my placating expression seemed to calm her as I took some of the tubs off the towers.

“Sorry, Regina,” I apologized, at once amused and heartbroken by the look on her face. That pout! Goodness… Then I looked down at the small containers of frozen delights and swallowed nervously. I shot Brooke a glance too, grinning from the side of my mouth. “We can get a couple of these but I can’t pay for all of them…” Regina’s pout got poutier. For a moment I forgot I was dealing with a sultry sex deity rather than a moody child. “I wish I could but I don’t have that much money on my card and I left my wallet at-”

“Don’t worry about it,” Brooke said, and she started placing tubs of overpriced ice cream into a bag, forgoing the price scans.

“What?” I turned to the milfy… I mean motherly... woman and she only smiled in return.

“Pay me back later,” she said with a shrug, and a delighted Regina dumped her armful onto the counter. Her unloaded chest jiggled distractingly. “I know you’ll be good for it. I’ll add it to your tab.” She did? Wait, she did tabs? I wasn’t sure what to make of her generosity and could only watch her continue to slide tubs of frosty treats into bags. “I’ll give you a 20% bulk discount too,” Brooke added. “Because your friend is so pretty.”

“Oh thank you. You are very kind, shopkeeper,” the Goddess smiled and leaned her elbows onto the counter. Her cleavage threatened to spill all the way out of her borrowed, ill-fitting top, although the store owner didn’t seem all that bothered by it.

“I’m Brooke,” she said with a smile, and offered a hand to the magical ring entity.

“Regina, charmed!” my Goddess answered brightly, taking that hand and shaking it firmly. I absently touched the ring on my finger and wondered… had it cooled down? Did I remember it warming up? Did I-

“Paying by card right?”

I was snapped back to the present as Brooke turned her card machine towards me. Oh. My groceries. I nodded and swiped to pay for my bags while Regina was already picking up her credited sacks of ice cream. “I love your hair!” Brooke called to us as we left the store, carrying so much ice cream that I knew would not fit into my small fridge freezer. I suppose I was about to dip into some further decadent indulgence for breakfast.